Recently I saw somebody boasting that Linus now uses Fedora and I don’t know why I found it silly. But then when Ingo Molnar even mentioned the name of the package where codiff is available I found that I can be silly too 😉

Work is supposed to take most of your time, right? Survival, mouths to feed, all that stuff… But it can be fun, even if not _directly_ kernel related. Sure, there is life outside the kernel, hey, “kernel”… I keep listening to the head-honchos (heck, I had to use that term, it looks like spanish, the language of our capital, Buenos Aires!): “forget about the kernel, the action is somewhere else, in (l)userland!”

So here I am, in userland, playing with GUI stuff, drag and drop! Python! GTK! Wow! Sounds boring? No, I don’t think so. Discovery time is never boring. Its fun to try for hours to grok some new semantic domain. Even if you, in another life, wrote a DOS GUI system out of reading a marketing insertion on Unix Review in 1988 😛

So what have I been doing in this strange land? Well, when you work you have to show the numbers, and explain them, and remember what happened when you switched that knob or applied that patch, no?

Damn, alchemy doesn’t requires you remember all that stuff, just taste the new stuff, if you think its not poisonous, that is.

But if you need to remember… There is something cooking for this year OLS, or to the first conference after it if it thinks I’m too bollocksish 🙂

And to _show you the code_, full of python newbie mistakes… but hey, I even dared to write python bindings for such supposedly interesting stuff as ethtool and schedutils.

And finally to what uses it: AIT, because short, meaningless names are en vogue. Anyway, try tuna, a tuning application that has a cool name, one that I unfortunately didn’t came up with but fortunately was near the genius that though about it, thanks!

And thanks to whoever did the right thing and brought Evgeniy to kernelplanet, he is da guy from Russia! Get healthy and in crazy coding frenzy mode again!

Cool stuff in the dwarves front. They are growing. One new feature I’ve been working on is to be able to change the word-size.

One can now use the DWARF info produced for an architecture with a X word-size and see how it looks like on another architecture with word-size Y.

More work is needed to cope with exceptions to a general set of alignment rules and then we’ll be able to ask pahole for the best possible member organization that will work across a series of architectures.

The mailing list is picking up steam, with different suggestions being made and improvement ensuing, with more patches trickling in.

One example of recent changes that were discussed in the mailing list was the inline improvements in codiff, the binary diff tool, discussed with Ilpo Järvinen, that he right away used in debloating the Linux kernel network infrastructure.

Soon I’ll be hard pressed to do some further improvements, with database, probably sqlite, being used to cache the results using build-id, that is becoming the norm in the -debuginfo packages made by distros, used as a key to previous results.

Database caching, once implemented, will pave the way for historical data collection, when we’ll be able to see how data structures evolve over time, like when you keep drinking and see your belly go round 😎

At that point creating a script that checks out tag after tag (changeset even, since we have plenty unused CPU power and disk space) and builds a software project, creating database entries, this time SCM changeset/tag tagged.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to know exactly when that extra belly wrinkle fat was generated? 😉

I invite everybody interested in the continuing development of pahole and the dwarves to join us subscribing the dwarves mailing list by sending a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org with “subscribe dwarves” on the body of the message. There are people already working on packaging the dwarves for several Linux distributions and even working on man pages!